Марк Дайс - The Liberal Media Industrial Complex

Kara Swisher responded, “I would,” and continued, whining “You know, last time I saw you, I was like, ‘Get Alex Jones off that platform,’ and you’re like, ‘Well the community guidelines,’ and then [later] you got him off.” 820She then changed the subject and went on to ask Susan if there was enough “diversity” in the company, particularly in management. “Diversity” is a code word for “less straight white men,” because Big Tech is concerned that there are too many of those kinds of people working in Silicon Valley.

Ben Shapiro is a huge nerd, he’s not a right-wing extremist or a hateful bigot, and is about as mainstream of a political commentator as you can get, yet Kara Swisher, who holds tremendous power in Silicon Valley and has direct access to all of the major CEOs, is demanding that he be banned from YouTube because she thinks he’s a right-wing extremist, proving that no conservative, no matter how moderate, is safe.

Demonetizing us, censoring our videos, down-ranking them in the search results, and hiding them from the “Recommended” section while boosting mainstream media channels still wasn’t silencing us enough, so YouTube decided to just give $25 million dollars to brand name news channels and provide them with special consulting to help them create more engaging videos and grow their audience on the platform. 821

“We will provide funding across approximately 20 global markets to support news organizations in building sustainable video operations,” they announced in July 2018. “Provided on an application basis to news organizations of all types, these grants will enable our partners to build key capabilities, train staff on video best practices, enhance production facilities and develop formats optimized for online video.” 822

So people like me were able to figure out how to produce quality and engaging videos and built an audience all on our own, but since ordinary YouTubers came to dominate mainstream media, YouTube decided to just give them everything they need to emulate what we had come to learn through years of innovation and practice.

The largest “YouTube news channel” is the Young Turks, which was started by progressive Democrat Cenk Uygur in 2005, and over the years has gotten help from some very wealthy benefactors. In 2014 they got $4 million dollars from an investment firm, 823and then later got another $20 million in 2017 from former Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. 824That’s not a typo— twenty million dollars!

It’s interesting that their channel bears the same name as the insurgent group of Muslims who committed genocide against the Armenian people (who were Christians), killing 1.5 million of them between 1914 and 1923 in one of the first modern day genocides. 825For years Cenk Uygur actually denied the Armenian Genocide until growing pressure caused him to change his position, saying he will refrain from commenting on it because he doesn’t know enough about it. 826

Making things even more bizarre is that the Young Turks cohost Anna Kasperian is Armenian, and works for a “news” organization which appears to be named after the very group which committed genocide against members of her own family. 827She’s the daughter of Armenian immigrants and actually grew up speaking Armenian as her first language. 828

While YouTube has a policy against allowing “extremist groups” on the platform, they have no problem with a channel that some interpret as paying homage to a group that murdered more than a million Christians. 829Instead, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki enjoys hanging out with them and tweeted a photo of herself sitting down talking with Cenk Uygur at YouTube’s headquarters, thanking him for his time. 830

Young Turks host Hasan Piker even declared that “America deserved 9/11” in response to Congressman Dan Crenshaw doing an interview with Joe Rogan where he said that Osama Bin Laden attacked the U.S. because of our western values. 831Piker also appeared to praise Al Qaeda for blinding Crenshaw (a retired Navy SEAL) who lost an eye while serving in Afghanistan in 2012. 832He then mocked the disabled veteran for having one eye. Hasan Piker is allowed to host a show on the platform, but Alex Jones isn’t. Piker has his own personal YouTube channel as well, that hasn’t been demonetized.

In 2016 YouTube launched their “Creators for Change” program where they began funding and coaching various YouTubers to make videos denouncing “hate speech,” “xenophobia,” and “extremism.” 833These handpicked social justice warriors produce propaganda for the platform and some of them promote the latest degeneracy the Left is trying to convince people is normal.

At the end of every year YouTube produces a mashup of what they consider to be the year’s top stars and it’s always a bunch of SJWs and LGBT activists. Their 2018 “Rewind” video, as it’s called, featured drag queens and highlighted Hollywood celebrities like Will Smith and John Oliver over ordinary YouTubers. It got so many thumbs down that overnight it became the most disliked video on YouTube ever . 834Shortly after that, YouTube announced that they were trying to figure out how to prevent what they called “dislike mobs” from “weaponizing the dislike button” and considered removing it altogether. 835

Since I’m an old school YouTuber, I was posting videos for six years before my channel was monetized (at the end of 2012) opening the door for me to become a professional YouTuber. While it has always been difficult to make a living on YouTube because monetized videos only pay a small fraction of a penny per view, a few years after I started doing it full time, it became almost impossible, especially for smaller channels that aren’t getting five to ten million views a month.

In April 2017 after the Wall Street Journal published a report about finding advertisements for major brands appearing on “racist” and “offensive” videos, all hell broke loose. Tons of companies pulled their advertisements from the platform entirely, kicking off what us YouTubers call the “Adpocalypse” (advertising apocalypse). YouTube immediately rolled out some new tools they had been testing to comb through the titles, tags, and descriptions of videos and automatically demonetize (strip advertisements from) ones that were about ( or even mentioned ) certain topics.

Every video uploaded is now immediately scanned by YouTube’s voice recognition software which creates a transcript of everything that’s said in the video. That transcript is then scanned for keywords that may indicate a video is about a “sensitive” or “controversial” topic and then demonetizes it if certain words or phrases are found. As a result of the Adpocalypse, almost half of all of my videos were demonetized, and from that point on making a living on YouTube became uncertain.

News channels like mine were hit the hardest, because news and politics are filled with “divisiveness” and controversial issues that YouTube wanted to shield advertisers from. For people who make cooking videos, or how-to videos about fixing cars, or doing home improvement projects, those kinds of videos aren’t about anything that’s particularly “non-advertiser friendly” like ones that talk about illegal immigration, climate change, political cover-ups, or exposing fake news.

Bloomberg News later reported, “In fact, 96.5% of all of those trying to become YouTubers won’t make enough money off of advertising to crack the U.S. poverty line.” 836Their report continued bearing bad news, pointing out that, “Breaking into the top 3% of most-viewed channels could bring in advertising revenue of about $16,800 a year… That’s a bit more than the U.S. federal poverty line of $12,140 for a single person. (The guideline for a two-person household is $16,460.) The top 3% of video creators of all time in [the research group’s] sample attracted more than 1.4 million views per month.” 837